WoW – More fun together!

Playing in the fires of the Cataclysm

Just some random ‘what we have been up to’ stuff from this weekend along with Cata thoughts.

Anyone that has not been rolling alts and trying the change noobie zones should do so. The main ones I did so far where they Gnome and Dwarf 1-5 areas and then the 5-10 area in common. Loved it!

The gnome starting bit is pretty cool. It does feel like it is ‘on rails’ as far as linearity but I think at lvl 1 that is great for getting a new player into things fast. I like the way as soon as they give you your first new ability they send you to use it on a dummy a few times. I would love to see what sort of statistics Blizzard collects on various bits of game play. I wonder if something told that some large percent of new players were only spamming their ‘1’ for the first 20 levels.

The dwarf area… Great changes! They tweaked things here and there, changed a couple quests out and the whole place was new again. I like how they weave the old ‘unchanged’ quests in with the new and tweaked ones to form an entirely new pattern.

The rest of the dwarf starting area… uber. Don’t leave if you hit lvl 10 early. Finish it all because it ends with some nice epicenes… epicocity? Epciferousness!

We did a few quests in Loch Modan too. Very impressed there too. Again it was small changes that were really important. Like making the second level of ‘kill troggs’ able to be gotten two without hiking back tough the first level troggs. A minor rearrangement of the world and now you don’t have to hack through guys you already killed to get to part 2.

This highlights the improved quest design that Bliz has learned. The most changed areas work like Northrend in that quests are in nice neat ‘packs’. You get 2-3 quests, go somewhere, do them all together (kill one thing while collecting another, etc) and then turn in and get a new ‘pack’ of quests. Also they don’t let you see all the packs at once. You tend to get only one or two options when you hit a new area and the new options don’t open up until you do the old ones. Some people might find that to be too ‘linear’ or something. I don’t. It was annoying to me to hit a new town, gather up eighty-leven and then stare at your log going WTH. Some would be green, some would be red. They would be scattered all over the zone. You could do them in any order but no matter what order you did them in they told no story. Linear? More like ‘plotless’. I want to feel like all my running around in the world means something. I mean if it is oh so important that I got kill 10 troggs… well why? Why does it matter? Oh so they invaded the troll area. ok, that is new… What? The trolls got displaced and are now attacking our town? Now I have a REASON the trolls need to die. Not just because some bored and probably drunk dwarf said so.

There are epicly cool quests woven in all over now. Don’t miss the G-Team in Gnomer or the Rambo quests in redridge. Or the ZG quests. Just start questing at Fort Livingston and don’t stop until… ah man, I can’t spoil it. It was too cool.

The whole time we were questing on noobies we were hearing in guild chat about other people doing other cool quests. Heck even in our own computer room. I was doing some other stuff while Analogue was catching her hunter up to my shaman. Despite not wanting to get spoilers I was hearing about some super nifty baby raptor quests. Now I have to get an alt into northern ST and see if I can find it.

In short there are amazing moments of epicness hidden all through the game now. Go find them!

So now we have a Priest-Shaman pair in the teen. We are resisting using heirlooms on those so we can savor all the quests.

We also have a Shaman-Hunter pair in the low thirties. I think those still have heirlooms but we might remove them.

We got our Warrior-Priest pair to 80 now so that is 4 80’s each.

I did a little gearing on my warrior which culminated in my first heroic que…. And I got PoS. Ouch. Despite me pulling out all the stops of tanking I was just too squishy to get Tyrannous down. Both me and the healer were doing ok skill wise but had too little gear to get’er done. I was in an average of 200 level gear but no enchants and most of it did not have tank stats. It was a good reminder that yes, there was some really hard content in WoTL and yes, gear does matter. If it had been worth enchanting my stuff I probably could have done the deed but oh well. I do look forward to having two flavors or max level tank in Cata.

I did the human 0-5 and that was nice. So far in the 6-10 I have not seem much different but I am only 7 on that alt.

Just did some BootyBay quests over lunch. We had not seen many changes and then BAM, ran right into some changes that were funny as heck. I am still grinning over that one. heh. No spoilers here though.

Yeeeeah, about Booty Bay … Karius is still unfriendly with them (and Gadgetzan and Ratchet) because of that little Bloodsail misunderstanding. I do believe the cloth turn-in peoples are still around though, so I should probably get around to clearing up that last couple thousand rep. He can enter the towns just fine, but he can’t talk to anyone. Oops.

I was doing both. My gear was marginal enough that I was using cooldowns in there like crazy. Also I always back up to an ice patch so when he does the knockback he knocks me over it and then kites himself trying to get to me. Heh. Works great.
I went pretty ‘gogogo’ myself to say the least. But after I got my first tank uber geared I have since leveled 2 (this one being my second) to max and started tanking. With these I started writing checks my gear could not cash and I had to get a lot better with strats and cooldown use. The problem in this case was that most of my gear did not have tanky stats and nothing was enchanted. So it was literally the crappiest gear taht would get me into the instance. No shock that that was not enough.
The first times I got my second bear in there I had a similar problem. Actually when PoS first dropped it was only a bit easier, but I did have better gear then. Only a little… and mostly it was just that there were more tank stats and not DPS stats.

Well except that first big hit; which is a huge one. And if you are too far away from the ice or the patch is at an angle you land on outer edge of the ice and take that damamge too. But otherwise it is a great trick.